"The hotel's location is ideal, a short walk from the Ponte di Rialto and Piazza San Marco, as well as many other sights. If you want a hotel in the Hilton family (for status and/or points etc), this hotel's location is so much better than the Hilton itself. When reaching the hotel on foot, avoid using Google Maps because it assumes that you can walk on water or swim. Instead in Venice, Apple Maps gives much more accurate and realistic directions, which was a first for us.
The hotel, after giving us directions for using public transport, didn't subsequently inform us that there was a nationwide general strike affecting the Vaporetto service on the night of our arrival. So when we arrived from the airport by coach to Piazzale Roma, we touched in using Apple Pay for the Vaporetto at 22:41 and went through the ticket barriers, but subsequently found that the door was locked with no access to the jetty. So instead of the boat journey for which we had paid 2 x €9.50 via Apple Pay, we had to walk more than 30 minutes with baggage to the hotel. The hotel ought to have warned us of this strike, particularly as we had informed the hotel of our intention to arrive by public transport.
The good news was that when we eventually arrived at the hotel, we had been upgraded to a junior suite in view of our Hilton gold status and my SLH Club 02 status. The junior suite was large and spacious, and a fantastic outcome after our troublesome journey. The junior suite is what caused me to give a rating of 5 stars, which considerably outweighed all the negative points.
The reception staff were all fantastic and very helpful. I was going to name each of them, but after we experienced consistently excellent service from all of them, each with different qualities, it wouldn't be fair to name some and omit others.
The temperature in the room was less than 18°C when we arrived, and it took most of the night to reach 23°C. Eventually it stabilised at around 24°C. The bed was very comfortable, although we would have preferred a duvet instead of sheets.
There were power sockets on both sides of the bed, but the sockets elsewhere were hidden and difficult to access, except for two in the bathroom. The safe was too small for a 16" laptop, which was unusual for a luxury hotel. The wifi was around 70Mbps upstream and downstream with the access point right outside our door. The choice of television channels was limited. CNN was the only English-speaking news channel, which focused only on one US-centric story during our stay. The hotel ought to add some European English-speaking news channels such as BBC World.
Flannels were helpfully provided in the bathroom, but no conventional bars of soap. The water pressure was good.
Breakfast is included in all room prices. Although this is very positive for some guests, I would have preferred the option to book without breakfast because free breakfast is a benefit of Hilton gold status and above. Breakfast is in a small room with enough seating for all guests. There wasn't a huge choice, but we found everything we needed, and the service from staff was excellent.
Like many upmarket hotels in Venice, the hotel has an arrangement with a glass factory on the island of Murano with a free private boat journey to and from Murano to see glass blowing and products. We were taken to Fornace CAM, but we didn't buy anything from them because almost no prices were displayed. When we asked the price of a vase, the salesman spent a couple of minutes calculating that it was €600 reduced from €1200. So we didn't want to spend lots of time asking the price of each subsequently item. In contrast, all the nearby shops displayed prices for everything, which were much more competitive.
I was disappointed by a discretionary labour charge that the hotel automatically added to the final bill, which was perhaps 5% - not sure exactly. When I book a hotel, I expect the price quoted to be the total price, as required by Italian, EU and UK legislation. I don't expect additional percentages for labour to be unexpectedly added on top of the quoted total price, even if discretionary. We obviously didn't pay it. I'm guessing this is aimed at guests from the US, where additional percentages for labour are customary, unlike in Europe.
Also be careful which web site you book on. The cheapest price is the hotel's own web site, but the headline price misleadingly excludes €9 per night city tax and you won't get Hilton or SLH status benefits such as upgrades. The Hilton and SLH web sites gave higher prices, but the SLH web site misleadingly failed to disclose the city tax at all. Only the Hilton web site honestly showed the total price including all taxes throughout the booking process."
